As well as playing a concerto with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and working with the festival’s young musicians academy, Nicola Benedetti’s brief residency at this year’s Cheltenham festival included a Town Hall recital with the trio she’s formed with her cellist partner Leonard Elschenbroich and the pianist Alexei Grynyuk.

Their programme was framed by two of the most substantial works in the piano trio literature, Schubert’s B flat Trio D898, and Brahms’s Trio in B major, Op 8. In between, Benedetti and Elschenbroich played the piece that Mark-Anthony Turnage wrote for them last year. Duetti d’Amore proves to be a more than useful addition to the scant repertory of works for violin and cello – a set of five miniatures, the longest of which lasts barely five minutes. The pieces are predominantly lyrical in tone. There’s the occasional moment when the emotional temperature is allowed to rise, but the expressive centre of gravity seems to be the penultimate piece in the set, with its high-lying violin lines that unfurl over pedal notes in the cello.

Benedetti and Elschenbroich played Turnage’s pieces with rapturous involvement, but the trio’s performances were a bit less convincing. Some slithery phrasing aside, they were technically excellent. But both the Schubert and the Brahms are works that can sprawl if not carefully shaped, and there was never enough feeling here of a collective agreement on the direction the works should take, or even of one musician being prepared to take the music by the scruff of its neck and single-handedly give it a sense of purpose. Depths in the Schubert went unexplored and the potential of Brahms’ expansive themes remained unexploited; both interpretations seemed like works-in-progress.

Later that evening, in the Parabola Arts Centre, the Australian pianist Zubin Kanga introduced a selection of pieces from his Dark Twin project – his attempts to expand the musical horizons of the piano with real-time electronics, video and computer enhancements. With three assistants at laptops and mixing desks, Kanga played seven works, four of which were premieres of one sort or another, in a sequence in which Michel van der Aa’s poignant Transit, for piano, electronics and video from 2009, almost took on the status of a classic.

Watch Zubin Kanga perform Dark Twin

The other pieces were sometimes innovative, often jokey in their use of video, and almost invariably too long for their musical and technological material. Dark Twin, the 2015 piece by Julian Day that provided Kanga with the title for his project, builds layer upon layer of repeated notes using computer transformations of his playing, but leaves the feeling of “so what?” at the end of it, while Patrick Nunn’s Morphosis attaches motion sensors to the pianist’s body to alter the timbres of the digital transformations during the performance. Kanga deals with everything asked of him with cool efficiency. One day, I suspect, a composer will come up with something genuinely worthwhile for him and his technology.

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